Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age.
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The Neolithic lasted in the Near East until the transitional period of the Chalcolithic from about 6, 500 years ago (4500 BC), marked by the development of metallurgy, leading up to the Bronze Age and Iron Age.
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In other places the Neolithic followed the Mesolithic and then lasted until later.
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Term Neolithic is modern, based on Greek 'new' and 'stone', literally 'New Stone Age'.
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Early Neolithic farming was limited to a narrow range of plants, both wild and domesticated, which included einkorn wheat, millet and spelt, and the keeping of dogs.
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Not all of these cultural elements characteristic of the Neolithic appeared everywhere in the same order: the earliest farming societies in the Near East did not use pottery.
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Around 10, 000 BC the first fully developed Neolithic cultures belonging to the phase Pre-Pottery Neolithic A appeared in the Fertile Crescent.
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However, most Neolithic societies were noticeably more hierarchical than the Upper Paleolithic cultures that preceded them and hunter-gatherer cultures in general.
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Whether a non-hierarchical system of organization existed is debatable, and there is no evidence that explicitly suggests that Neolithic societies functioned under any dominating class or individual, as was the case in the chiefdoms of the European Early Bronze Age.
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Theories to explain the apparent implied egalitarianism of Neolithic societies have arisen, notably the Marxist concept of primitive communism.
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Profound differences in human interactions and subsistence methods associated with the onset of early agricultural practices in the Neolithic have been called the Neolithic Revolution, a term coined in the 1920s by the Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe.
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